Snapshot Viewer

  • Thread starter Thread starter Basil
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Basil

Hiya, I am having a real big problem with Snapshot
Viewer... unfortunately my whole project is 100% reliant
on it working. Please help...

I am running Access 97 on Windows 2000.

If I open a report and try and send/export to external
file with snapshot format, it flashes up a little box for
a millisecond that is doing something - and then nothing
happens - it doesn't produce the grey pop up that normally
shows the pages being loaded.

It works fine if I create a new simple report and try and
send it, but the reports that I need are not simple and
are the ones which it doesn't work on. A few days ago it
worked fine on 1 of the reports, and after virtually no
(possibly none at all) changes it now doesn't.

There was problem I had before on some reports where it
only showed the header, but seemed to print out the lot -
the current problem could be linked.

Either way, I urgently need a reliable way to get the
information across - due to graphics in the reports I
cannot use RTF etc, so snapshot seems like the only
option. I have the latest version (suitable for Access97)
downloaded. Please tell me how I can get this to work
reliably (or where it explains how to) - it is crucial.

Thanks loads,

Basil
 
Basil said:
Hiya, I am having a real big problem with Snapshot
Viewer... unfortunately my whole project is 100% reliant
on it working. Please help...

I am running Access 97 on Windows 2000.

If I open a report and try and send/export to external
file with snapshot format, it flashes up a little box for
a millisecond that is doing something - and then nothing
happens - it doesn't produce the grey pop up that normally
shows the pages being loaded.

It works fine if I create a new simple report and try and
send it, but the reports that I need are not simple and
are the ones which it doesn't work on. A few days ago it
worked fine on 1 of the reports, and after virtually no
(possibly none at all) changes it now doesn't.

There was problem I had before on some reports where it
only showed the header, but seemed to print out the lot -
the current problem could be linked.

Either way, I urgently need a reliable way to get the
information across - due to graphics in the reports I
cannot use RTF etc, so snapshot seems like the only
option. I have the latest version (suitable for Access97)
downloaded. Please tell me how I can get this to work
reliably (or where it explains how to) - it is crucial.
Click to expand...

In Access 97 (not sure about newer versions) the creation of a Snapshot
would not work if the report had a background image in the picture property
and with other embedded images it would fail if they were over a certain
size.
 
You should do a search on GoogleGroups.com and you will see a lot issues
surrounding the generation of SNapshot files on Access97. These issues
rrange from the silly to the sublime.
With Image files, I have found it best to preload and convert any format
other than BMP or EMF into BMP files and then load those into the Image
control at runtime. THere is code on my site showing you how to do this
easily.
http://www.lebans.com/printfailures.htm

FInally, If the Report contains a lot of formatting and graphics there
is a known issue where the Snapshot export process will silently fail
when >1MB of Image data is on a single output page. If this is not the
case then I would suggest selecting a generic printer driver, say LJ
HP6, and try to export the Report with this specific Printer.


--

HTH
Stephen Lebans
http://www.lebans.com
Access Code, Tips and Tricks
Please respond only to the newsgroups so everyone can benefit.
 
An alternative approach to consider is to create PDF output instead of snapshot format. This is simple
using a PDF printer driver (such as PDF995 or the PDF Writer in the full Adobe Acrobat product). You simply
print the report to the PDF 'Printer' and a pdf file is generated.

As well as avoiding any issues with the snapshot output and viewers, PDF has the benefit of allowing compression
and resolution to be specified for the images, so you can create a low-res highly-compressed version for
web/email distribution, and/or a higher quality version for LAN access or printing.
 
Thanks all of you for your suggestions.

For a little more information - it has 1 TIF picture on it
(not background) - 30K. That's it - pretty simple
formatting too, but the creation of it is complex with
size/position/visibility/labels and datasource all fed in
via VBA at run-time.

I am thinking about the pdf thing, but I'm a little
hesitant - wouldn't it require me to save every report
when writing to it? - there will be about 200 reports sent
out (total) at a time to 40 sources (5 reports each - each
one filtered by source at run-time - The reports are
similar but I decided to use 5 reports instead of
instances coz it's complicated enough for me already!).

I don't know how I could get pdf writer to load up the
reports for 1 hospital, then mail them out then repeat 39
times for all the other hospitals.

I'll get onto googlegroups and have a look too.

Thanks so much for all your time lads, I'll be dedicating
the project to MSDN!!

Basil

-----Original Message-----


An alternative approach to consider is to create PDF
Click to expand...
output instead of snapshot format. This is simple
using a PDF printer driver (such as PDF995 or the PDF
Click to expand...
Writer in the full Adobe Acrobat product). You simply
print the report to the PDF 'Printer' and a pdf file is generated.

As well as avoiding any issues with the snapshot output
Click to expand...
and viewers, PDF has the benefit of allowing compression
and resolution to be specified for the images, so you can
Click to expand...
create a low-res highly-compressed version for
 
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